Editorial: States opt out of delusion

Our opinion: It appears most states aren’t going along with President Donald Trump’s wasteful hunt for fake voter fraud.

Whether President Donald Trump is just cynically milking the non-issue of massive voter fraud for political advantage or really believes this delusion, at least 44 states and the District of Columbia refuse, to one degree or another, to indulge him. That’s astonishing — and encouraging.

While it’s predictable enough that Democratic officials, like New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo, would rebuff the president’s absurd crusade, it’s a surprise to hear some Republicans decline to play along, too. That’s a refreshing change from a party that, until now, seemed willing to tolerate whatever this president did, no matter how outrageous or counterproductive.

Mr. Trump seems unable to get over the fact that, while he won the Electoral College tally, he lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes. So he resurrected and amplified a debunked conspiracy theory — that millions of illegal votes were cast, including many by undocumented immigrants. Without all that fraud, he says, he would have won the popular vote, too.

That might have been just a sad commentary on the fragility of Mr. Trump’s ego but for his decision, as president, to turn his baseless assertion into at least one official investigation, if not two. He created a Presidential Advisory Commission on Voter Integrity, which last week called for states to hand over detailed voter data, which includes some private information normally protected by law, such partial Social Security numbers and dates of birth. Separately, the Justice Department asked states to supply information on how they purge ineligible voters from their lists.

So far, a CNN survey finds 44 states are either refusing to cooperate with the commission altogether or declining to give information that is not otherwise publicly available. The list includes Indiana and Kansas, the home states of the commission’s co-chairs, Vice President Mike Pence and Kris Kobach, respectively. It also includes solid red states like Mississippi, whose Republican secretary of state, Delbert Hoseman, said the commission “can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”

This probably should have been expected, especially in more conservative states where distrust of the federal government runs strongest. The commission’s effort to gather data on every voter in America would be about as palatable as a national ID program, a central repository of student data, or a federal gun registry, especially among Trump voters.

The president, sadly, hasn’t gotten the message; he’s now questioning what states are trying to hide.

When it comes to the integrity of U.S. elections, there are real problems worth looking into — the use of voter ID laws and other tactics to suppress votes; Russia’s attempts to manipulate last year’s presidential election; or the use of gerrymandering to give political parties an unfair electoral advantage. Those, however, don’t fit Mr. Trump’s mythology.

For now, Americans will have to settle for whatever checks and balances there are on a conspiracy theory-chasing president for whom winning, strangely, is not enough.